Sogou

Search engine and web applications

Sogou search engine (Sogou.com) was launched on 3 August 2004. Sogou's web application products are designed to classify online information, such as music, picture, video clip, news, map and vertical information. As of 2017, it has an index of 10 billion pages.

As of 2017, over 90% of the company's revenues are from search advertising.

In October 2017, Sogou began testing a general search engine within WeChat, which would allow all 902 million daily active users to access the internet within the app. Since 2013, Sogou has only been able to search and index contents of WeChat official accounts. On the first quarter conference call, 2018, Sogou provided an update indicating so far results in WeChat have been positive, resulting in a 30% improvement in click through rate.

Sogou Input Method

Initially released in 2006, Sogou Pinyin is the most popular Chinese input software in China. It makes use of its search engine techniques which are the analysis and categorization of the most popular words or phrases on the Internet. In 2007, Sogou won a patent infringement case against Google for copying their IME. Baidu is second with a 25.7% market share. IME data gives companies large amounts of keystroke history to improve search result accuracy. As of early 2018, the Sogou Input Method app is the third most downloaded app and commands a 70% marketshare.

Sogou Browser

Launched in December 2008, Sogou browser adopts a "dual-core" (Google Chrome's WebKit and Internet Explorer's Trident layout engines) techniques and it connects to the cloud to recognize malicious websites and software. Several websites describe Sogou Explorer as malicious adware and recommend users not to install it, since user settings are changed and URLs are sent to servers in China, without user consent, violating user privacy. The software is reported as difficult to remove.^[4]

Sogou Voice Recognition Technology

Sogou has been developing voice recognition technology since 2011. At the World Internet Conference in November 2016, CEO Wang Xiaochuan demonstrated a voice translation with both Chinese and English translation with up to 95% accuracy. There has been a rush to partner with manufacturers in connecting devices to the internet between competitors like Baidu. Google-backed AI startup Mobvoi had a deal fall through with Xiaomi's for their MiTV launch in March 2017. Xiaomi company representatives pointed to Sogou getting the business using their ASR solution with accuracy up to 97%. Sogou is currently China's largest search engine by voice, as the country moves from desktop to mobile search.

Hardware Products

In 2017, Sogou through their Internet of Things subsidiary, sold over 1 million smartwatches in China. The GPS positioning smartwatch focuses on the child market.

On March 22, 2018, Sogou launched the Travel Translator and Travel Pen, which sold out on the first day. The company estimates it will exceed sales of their smartwatches.

Sogou Lip Recognition Technology

On 15 December 2017, Sogou debuted a lip reading program that can operate at up to 90% accuracy, beating out a similar program by Google.

Partnership with Microsoft Bing

In May 2016, Sogou partnered with Microsoft to use Bing to search for English results, then get the result translated back into Chinese.

Other Investments

In 2018, Sogou has expanded global presence of their other keyboard app, Typany, of which they own 100% of the company. To date, the app works with over 100 languages. The app goes with their strategy of dominating the voice recognition and language recognition market.

Along with Tencent, Sogou participated in round C and D in Zhihu.com. According to Sogou's IPO prospectus, their investment in Round C in 2015 was 4.8% of Zhihu. In 2014, Sogou launched Zhihu search and is also the default search engine on Zhihu.

In 2016, Sogou donated $30 million to Tsinghua University in a joint partnership to build an Artificial Intelligence Institute. It currently supports the Sogou Search Engine Technology Joint Laboratory at Tsinghua University. Located on the edge of the campus of Tsinghua University, Sogou strategically recruits and partners to train students from the most talented minds in China. Since 2015, Tsinghua has been ranked as the best engineering and computer science school in the world based on factors including total research output and performance.

According to the prospectus, Sogou owns 100% of Chengdu Easypay, a financial techology company specializing in micro loans. As of April 2018, Sogou is still awaiting Government approval to operate in the country. According to the company address, it is located on the 13th floor of Tencent's building in Chengdu in the High-tech zone.